The Italian villa from the film Call Me By Your Name is for sale

In honour of International Women's Day, women who changed the face of design

A Chelsea House with the louche-luxe feel of a private club

The owner of this Chelsea house asked interior designer Freddy van Zevenbergen to give his home the louche-luxe feel of his favourite private members' club, resulting in art-filled, robust rooms ideal for entertaining

The narrow old Chelsea streets running down to the river are among the most atmospheric in London. An area with a rich social and artistic history, it may not have the grand houses of Kensington or Notting Hill, but what its artisans' cottages and artists' studios often lack in size, they more than make up for in character, and it has long attracted a mix of wealthy and cultured residents.

Take the owner of this house, which has been decorated by Freddy van Zevenbergen of Lambart & Browne. A Belgian art collector and Anglophile, the owner had already lived here for five years before calling in Freddy. As well as wanting a place to display his art collection, he loves to throw parties and entertain, so the reception rooms' furniture and furnishings had to be relatively robust. 'He wanted it to feel a bit like Loulou's,' says Freddy, referring to Robin Birley's louche-luxe private members' club in Mayfair, which Lambart & Browne designed in 2012.

As it happens, it was in Loulou's that Freddy and the owner first met - not, perhaps, the typical setting for a client meeting, but then Freddy is not your typical decorator. Tall and willowy with long blond hair, he has the look of a Van Dyck cavalier. He is funny and charming, and you can see why Nicky Haslam gave him a job at the age of 19. Freddy worked for Nicky for five years, leaving in 2010 with his colleague, finance director Tom Browning, to found Lambart & Browne. They have worked on projects ranging from private residences in Europe, a nightclub for an estate in St Tropez and the new Bagatelle restaurant in Monaco.

Advertisement

When it came to working on this house, the first challenge was the fact that the property is made up of two adjoining houses. Although at some point in their history they had been conjoined, they still present two different frontages to the street and retain two separate sets of stairs. This makes for a rather muddling floorplan, not to mention numerous small changes of level, which, along with the usual constraints of working on Grade II-listed buildings, added to the difficulties of the job.

'The interiors hadn't been touched since the Eighties,' Freddy says. 'So we had a lot of decorative work to do.' Laminate flooring was replaced with French oak floorboards of roughly the same age as the house, while the original pine panelling on the ground floor was carefully stripped, then given a pale translucent wash to counteract the Swiss chalet effect.

The main front door leads into a small square entrance hall, pine panelled and sparsely furnished, where guests can divest themselves of coats and bags. Behind the hall is a small snug, while a connecting door leads, so to speak, next door, with the pine-panelled dining room at the front and the kitchen behind. With its working fireplace and fluted Corinthian pilasters, the dining room gives a sense of how these attractive little Chelsea town houses must once have looked, while a full-height portrait from the owner's art collection adds a strikingly contemporary touch. The kitchen has pale oak cupboards lined in olive wood, but is dominated by the island, constructed from a block of grey Tuscan marble, one end of which still bears the marks of where it was extracted from the ground.

Advertisement

On the first floor, the drawing room's panelling mirrors that of the dining room directly below, though here Freddy chose to paint it in three different shades of grey. This gives it a brighter, less masculine look, with strong splashes of colour introduced by Vik Muniz's large Van Gogh-like collage and a corner sofa in a brilliant emerald green. Next door is a pine-panelled games room and a small study, with five bedrooms upstairs.

The panelling in the spare bedroom was too damaged to restore, so Freddy lined the walls with a dark herringbone cashmere, which contrasts with the pale Italian marble of the bathroom behind. In the main bedroom, the contrast is reversed, with pale walls and a bathroom in rare dark Portor marble. Dividing the two is a set of limed fumed-oak wardrobes, with leather inserts and nickel studs, which Freddy cheekily describes as 'a bit S&M'. The owner's favourite feature, though, is the secret door at the back of one of the wardrobes, which opens to reveal the otherwise hidden back staircase. As the owner says, 'It feels like entering Narnia after wading through all the shoes'